Find out what’s holding back your growth. And know what to do about it.
A two-week engagement that finds your biggest growth opportunities and turns them into a prioritized Growth Action Plan, so you stop guessing what to do next and start breaking through your growth stall.
See if the Growth Diagnostic is right for you 30-minute conversation with Zac · No sales pitch
–Matt Whipple, Head of Growth, The Pour Over
Growth doesn’t need to be this confusing
That’s why we built the Growth Diagnostic. It starts with what you think your biggest growth constraint is, shows you what’s really going on, and how to fix it. Then it looks at your growth system for the few opportunities that can move the number 100%, not another 10%.
See if the Growth Diagnostic is right for you›how it works
This is a simplified version. Yours gives every ranked opportunity its own brief, and turns the first 90 days into a project plan.
When they switched payment providers in March, the system went from chasing a declined card four times over two weeks to once over three days. They went from saving 31% of those customers to 6%. That is about 835 people a month who wanted to stay and left anyway. More than half of all cancellations are now people who never chose to cancel, and nobody on the team owns that number.
Frequency on the main prospecting audience is 4.2, up from 2.6 a year ago, and what it costs to reach them has climbed with it. 68% of last quarter’s spend went to four ads, all of them more than 5 months old. The symptom is content frequency, but the root cause is actually their testing process. For example, 12 outstanding tests last quarter weren’t even formally called.
New customers used to come back for a second order 44% of the time. Now it is 36%. It slipped a little every month for over a year, which is why nobody caught it. The dashboard shows one repeat rate for everybody, and that stayed flat, because subscribers kept ordering and hid what was happening to first-time buyers.
Nine percent of subscribers ship to a business address. They order 2.4 times the volume of a household subscriber and cancel at a third the rate. Put a workplace plan in front of the accounts already shipping to offices and watch the take rate.
The top six, scored on impact, confidence and ease. Sequence is not the same as score: the retention fixes come first, because keeping more customers raises what you can afford to spend winning new ones.
| # | Opportunity | Area | Score | Known? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Go back to trying declined cards four times over two weeks | Technology | 9.0 | New |
| 2 | Offer a workplace plan to the accounts already shipping to offices | Plan | 8.8 | New |
| 3 | Fix the page where customers update their card, which fails 18% of the time | Technology | 8.7 | New |
| 4 | Call the 12 outstanding ad tests, and agree what finished means | Process | 8.5 | Known, unsized |
| 5 | Give one person ownership of failed payments, with a weekly report | People | 8.3 | New |
| 6 | Increase testing cadence to 24 ads a month once the process holds | Process | 8.0 | Known, unsized |
What to do first, what to hold, and what evidence would change the order.
“Not to overstate it, you completely transformed The Pour Over’s growth strategy: we began feeding a quality/value signal back to Meta, shifted optimization toward higher-quality leads, doubled click rate in comparable cohorts, and increased spend by 30% while improving LTV to CAC in the process.”
“Zac and 4th Quarter helped us grow from $10M to $300M+ invested on Roots by building the system behind our growth. They connected our data, channels, and testing cadence into one operating machine, giving us a repeatable way to find leverage, understand what’s driving performance, and compound what works.”
“4th Quarter is Fieldcrest Ventures’ secret weapon. They audit growth assumptions before I invest and serve as the plug-and-play growth operating partner once I invest, de-risking my investments and improving returns.”
Why this is different
A channel audit grades one channel against its own benchmarks and assumes the constraint lives there. Most of the time it does not. A symptom may surface in the channel, but its root cause is usually somewhere else entirely, like checkout, onboarding, or audience.
The Growth Diagnostic starts at your Growth System: your plan, people, process, technology and timing. You still get the channel optimizations, but you understand and have a plan for the root cause issues that may be happening at the system level.
We built our own diagnostic harness on Claude Code. It does the parts a machine is good at: mapping the context, working through the data, and checking claims against a second source. Zac still runs the Growth Diagnostic.
The harness also matches patterns across our libraries, 709 and growing, including growth loops, channel methodologies, category creation stories, and how top growth operators think.
That is how all five parts of the Growth System get covered properly in two weeks, how a claim gets checked against a second source before it becomes a finding, and how we leverage AI to catch what even experienced growth operators may miss.
Your investment
A two-week turnaround begins once payment is received and the intake call and access are complete. You own the entire diagnosis and the Growth Action Plan. 4th Quarter can partner with you to help you implement the plan.
Growth misses really add up
Meet your growth guide
Hi, I’m Zac Litwack. I’ve managed over $100 million in ad spend and built audiences into the billions of pageviews and streams. I helped grow OutKick and sell it to Fox in 2021, and most recently I ran growth at Roots, taking it from about $10 million to over $300 million invested on the platform.
Even after operating growth functions for over 15 years, I still get blind spots when I’m running the same company for a few years. You test your original hypotheses. Some work. You build playbooks around them, and you get caught iterating on the same playbooks over and over again. You have trouble seeing the proverbial forest from the trees as you get closer and closer to the data and your users.
That is not a personal failing. It is what happens to every growth system as the company outgrows it.
What got you to $10 million usually won’t get you to $50 million or $100 million. These inflection points stress test your growth system, and if it doesn’t have a solid foundation you’re going to falter. That may be what you’re feeling right now.
I’ve missed things in my own business that someone from the outside would have caught in an afternoon.
That’s why we created the Growth Diagnostic: when you combine that fresh perspective and experience with AI, great things happen.
See if the Growth Diagnostic is right for you
